Biography 29.2 (Spring 2006) © Biographical Research Center · cosponsored an exhibition on Heco and the castaway John Manjiro entitled Humanity Above Nation. But a closer look at

Biography 29.2 (Spring 2006) © Biographical Research Center

PERSONALITY, RACE, AND GEOPOLITICS IN

JOSEPH HECO’S NARRATIVE OF A JAPANESE

HSUAN L. HSU

The career of Joseph Heco, born Hamada Hikozo, spans a dizzying array ofambitions, accomplishments, and obstacles situated at the intersection of theexpanding commercial influence of the US and the modernization of Japan.After growing up in a small village on the coast of Japan, Heco took to seaand spent fifty days adrift with the crew of a wrecked ship in 1850 beforebeing rescued by the American ship Auckland bound for San Francisco. Heco,who was only thirteen years old at the time, remained in the US for nineyears, studying English and working at a variety of manual and administra-tive jobs. Intentionally groomed to represent Western interests in Japan, hemet with three US presidents, and became naturalized as the first JapaneseAmerican citizen; when he returned to his homeland in 1859, he was a for-eigner working as an interpreter for the US Consul at Yokohama. After work-ing at the consulate for several years, Heco spent the last decades of his lifeengaging in a series of business ventures, including the creation of Japan’s firstnewspaper, the establishment of a mint, and consultations with influentialpolitical figures during the tense period surrounding the Meiji Restoration of1868, when the emperor’s seizure of power from the Tokugawa Shogunateresolved decades of intra-national strife. Finally, in 1892 and 1895, Hecopublished a two-volume autobiography entitled The Narrative of a Japanese.Since his death in 1897, Heco has been widely recognized as a cultural ambas-sador who worked to internationalize Japanese institutions: his autobiogra-phy, for example, was soon republished in Japanese as Amerika Hikozo, andeven translated into German in 1898,1 and in 1998 the Joseph Heco Societycosponsored an exhibition on Heco and the castaway John Manjiro entitledHumanity Above Nation. But a closer look at the Narrative’ s form, content,and historical context reveals much more than a simple endorsement ofJapan’s assimilation into a broader international scene.

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274 Biography 29.2 (Spring 2006)

Due to a lack of published reviews and publisher’s records, the condi-tions of the Narrative’ s publication and distribution are largely shrouded inmystery. Given the “tremendous vogue in the United States for all thingsJapanese” in the final decades of the nineteenth century, along with whatMargaret Mehl has characterized as a “boom” in historical writing about thelate Edo period during the 1890s, one would think that Heco’s autobiogra-phy would have attracted considerable attention (Benfey xi).2 Heco’s Narra-tive likewise seems ideally situated to catalyze recent trends towards interna-tionalization in the fields of American Studies and area studies.3 But no majorperiodical reviewed the work at the time of publication, and even in the lastfew decades only a handful of (primarily biographical) studies have made anymention of it.4

Among the factors that have contributed to the Narrative’s history of non-reception is its confusion with respect to intended audience. To publish anEnglish-language autobiography in Japan was to address an unusually smallcircle of potential readers. And even within this limited circle of Anglophonereaders in Japan, the Narrative seems to vacillate about whether its intendedreadership consisted of Western émigrés or Japanese with an interest in theWest. The first volume of the Narrative was put out by the Yokohama Print-ing and Publishing Company—a short-lived company that published only afew English-language texts about Japan in the 1890s5; a Japanese-languageinsert, however, announces that the second volume was published by Maru-zen, a company that had already taken a lead in making practical Westernknowledge and technologies available to Japanese readers.6 Similarly, theautobiography’s first volume was quickly translated into Japanese in 1893—a fact that suggests that it was to some extent edited and published with Japan-ese readers in mind. On the other hand, both versions of Heco’s manuscriptnotebooks begin with a page of carefully crafted prose (omitted from the Nar-rative) that clearly imagines a Western audience interested in Japan as a quasi-fictional, premodern “region” whose very existence is temporally suspendedby Heco’s doubled verbs: “There was or is a country lying in the extremityof the Eastern Hemisphere from time immemorial, but was comparativelyunknown to the rest of the world” (Notebooks I.1, emphasis added).7

Questions of authorship have also kept scholars at a skeptical distancefrom Heco’s writings. For the Narrative was edited by a Scottish novelist, his-torian, socialist, and Japanophile named James Murdoch, and Heco’s imper-fect English grammar has led several readers—including Tominaga Makitaand Masao Miyoshi—to suggest that Murdoch rewrote or heavily revised thenarrative (Miyoshi 12, 189n15).8 There is no question that Heco’s Englishwas unidiomatic9; however, a thorough examination of the two sets of Heco’s

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manuscript notebooks housed at the Tenri Library in Japan has convincedme that, with a few exceptions which I will detail below, most of Murdoch’salterations to Heco’s prose were grammatical, rather than substantive.10 Moreimportantly, the section of the Narrative that deals with Heco’s shipwreckand his experiences in the US—a section whose coherent narrative and sug-gestive imagery would suggest that Murdoch played a greater role in editingit—turns out to have been written out twice and carefully edited in Heco’sown handwriting. Heco’s painstaking practice of recopying his own note-books evinces not only a dedication to improving the grammar and style ofhis autobiography, but also a broader drive towards self-improvement visibleeven in the steadily increasing neatness of his handwriting (Figure 1).11

In addition to these problems of authorship and audience, the Narrativealso suffers from formal and stylistic unevenness. For, with the exception of afew insightful and dramatic passages, the book reads like a failed narrative, anautobiography without a discrete subject. This is because about a quarter ofthe way into Heco’s text, something frustrating and disorienting occurs: itsprotagonist virtually disappears. After presenting a vivid and often insightfulaccount of his varied and often unprecedented experiences in the US, Heco’sidiosyncratic voice fades, and the Narrative shifts into the mode of journal-istic chronicle. Thus the narrative of a Japanese—an individual protagonistwho went through unique and instructive experiences—becomes the genericnarrative of a Japanese—an abstract and unmodulated report of meetings andevents that took place after Heco’s return to Japan in 1859.

Despite these difficulties, the Narrative remains suggestively and ambiva-lently situated between democratic individualism and the racial and politicaltensions surrounding Japan’s forced entry into the capitalist world-system.12

Indeed, a closer examination of its authorship, publication context, and formalshift from autobiography to chronicle suggests that the Narrative’ s very flawsilluminate this asymmetrical international context—a context characterized

Hsu, Joseph Heco’s Narrative of a Japanese 275

Figure 1: Detail of manuscript of Notebooks I.2. Reprinted with the permission of the TenriLibrary, Tenri, Japan.

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by the trans-Pacific circulations of technology, military force, economicinequality, and cultural assimilation. This paper will situate Heco’s text with-in—or rather, in the margins of—the US autobiographical tradition thatforms both its rationale (as the elaboration of a “representative personality”suitable for modern Japanese readers) and the conditions of its failure. It willthen move on to explore the various political and economic pressures that ledto Heco’s unsettling disappearance from his own autobiography. This lack offit between democratic ideals and Japan’s forced modernization, I argue, pro-vides a framework for understanding the Narrative’ s problems of authorship,distribution, and form. More broadly, it helps us to understand the geopo-litical conditions for the aesthetic “failure” of early Asian American (or Asiandiasporic) writings that attempted—or were forced by circumstances—toexpress experiences of subordination and exclusion by means of Americanand ostensibly “democratic” literary forms.

EXTRACTING THE SELF

Hikozo [Heco] is an essentially opaque character who appears to lack sex-ual or romantic feelings, or any emotions beyond homesickness—and hasa Zelig-like capacity for briefly encountering historical characters whohave little to do with the story of his life.

—Sobel Weber 249

The formal and stylistic disparities between the first few chapters of the Nar-rative and Heco’s extended account of daily life in Japan in the text’s remain-ing four hundred pages can be characterized as a shift from autobiographicalnarrative to journalistic chronicle. In a sense, what the book narrates is thedisintegration of narrative itself, as Heco subsumes his account of his owntranscultural Bildung to an impersonal chronicle of daily life and historicalevents in Japan. Beginning as a tale of shipwreck, adventure, and ambivalentcultural assimilation,13 the Narrative gradually mutates into a running tran-scription of reports, rumors, and secondhand explanations about Japan’sunification, as well as a disengaged record of Heco’s various occupations andtravels within and around Yokohama.

The first chapter immediately invokes the conventions of Western adven-ture narratives such as Robinson Crusoe (1719) and The Narrative of ArthurGordon Pym (1838) by recounting Heco’s provincial upbringing and increas-ing fascination with his brother’s travel stories:

He would repeat to us the strange stories he used to hear from the still stranger peo-ple he had met—people who had ways so different from our own (my townsmen),


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for in these days the means of communication and travel were very different fromthe railways, steamers, and telegraphs of today, and the simple village-folk seldomwent further from their own homes than perhaps a distance of twenty or thirtymiles, so that Nagasaki was as far from us then comparatively speaking as was Mos-cow from London at that same date. . . . Thus the first thought of rambling creptinto my mind, and from that moment my desire to leave home never ceased. (I.3)

The circulation of strange stories (both stories about strangers and the sto-ries that strangers told) possesses Heco with a roving disposition only tem-porarily forestalled by his mother’s entreaties to remain in the rural village ofKomiya.14 In addition to registering the contagious nature of travel narratives(which could after all be included among the technologies of communicationto which Heco attributes modernity’s compression of relative distances), thisopening chapter introduces a future-oriented temporality, a point of viewovershadowed by the “railways, steamers, and telegraphs of today” and by thehistorical conditions in which his native village “has now dwindled to aboutone-seventh of its former size and importance” (1).

A retrospective temporality also informs Heco’s accounts of his earlyencounters with Americans: he repeatedly reports hearing English phrases andwitnessing actions whose meanings he only learned later on. For example, theAmerican Mate’s recording of nautical observations gives rise to the followingdiscussion among the Japanese castaways:

the mate brought out a large book, in which he wrote something which he copiedfrom a stone board (i.e., the log-slate ). We had much conjecture and discussion asto what the Mate was doing, and some of my companions thought he was writing,or copying down the number of waves he had taken notice of while he was onwatch, for the English writing seemed like the waves, up and down, and runningsidewise. But others maintained . . . that the writing was to note down the distancethe vessel had made during the previous day and night, which was measured andcounted by the deck officer, or watch, and the Captain by walking the deck back-wards and forwards. We learned afterwards what it was that the Mate was reallydoing. (I.76)

Because Western speech and technologies were at first enshrouded in mysteryand potential danger, the early sections of Heco’s account make frequent ref-erences to his subsequent enlightenment. But in the meantime, Heco pro-vides a detailed account of his Japanese companions’ differing interpretationsof such phenomena. Every new encounter occasions controversy and debate.Did the phrase “Gold Mountain” written out for them by the Chinese cookindicate the name of the ship, or its destination? Were the “flesh-like things”that they were fed on deck the abominable meat of four-footed animals? Were


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the Westerners cannibals, who would eat the castaways when food ran short?In such passages—whose protagonist is not “I” but a heterogeneous “We”striving to arrive at a consensus through debate—Heco comes closest to rep-resenting himself as part of a community. This community of compatriotsin turn provides Heco with the interpersonal leverage to criticize, occasion-ally, the Americans who mistreat them: “Wherefore we kept silent, but angerbegan to smoulder in our breasts” (I.115).

Heco’s description of different subjective perspectives on mysterious West-ern objects, customs, and bodies begins to give way to a more impersonal nar-rative voice when he shifts from sporadic references to the Japanese lunar cal-endar to a more consistent diary form starting with an entry dated “March11th [1852]” (Notebooks I.107).15 This formal transition enacts Heco’s dis-ciplinary adoption not only of the regular practice of English composition, butalso of a mode of temporality that Benedict Anderson has shown to be cen-tral to the formation of modern nations—“an idea of ‘homogeneous, emptytime,’ in which simultaneity is, as it were, transverse, cross-time, marked notby prefiguring and fulfillment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured byclock and calendar” (Imagined 24). Heco later expresses his investment in thiscalendrical mode of temporality when, during a leisurely trip through thecountryside, he momentarily waxes nostalgic for “old Japan, when the hourswere of little value and folk had really time to live” (II.128). In addition, hispublication of Japan’s first newspaper, the Kaigai Shimbun [Overseas News],from about 1865 to 1867,16 effectively aligned calendrical time with inter-national commerce by emphasizing foreign news, and particularly the currentprices of imports and exports (II.59).17

Unlike conventional diaries, the Narrative deliberately shies away fromprivate thoughts and personal experiences. Heco’s aspiration to fashion a pub-lic and publishable personality can be seen in both the material he includesand the events he edits out of his regular diary. For example, Heco goes intogreat detail in recording his interactions with high-profile diplomats, power-brokers, and merchants, occasionally illustrating these passages with hand-drawn diagrams. In the first of these diagrams—which represents a meetingbetween a Russian admiral and the Governors of Kanagawa—Heco reduceshimself to the cipher “S” (standing for “Self”) distinguished by its proximi-ty to the government officials (I.224). Later, Heco provides another diagram(Figure 2) to emphasize visually his proximity to the Prince of Higo duringan audience in which the Prince asked him to describe “the manners and cus-toms and progress and civilization of foreign countries” (II.137). These dia-grams represent Heco’s “Self” abstractly as a cipher, a placeholder receivingsignificance from its proximity to prominent politicians. Heco seems to take

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particular pride in describing how a Karo [high-ranking samurai], when toldby the Prince “to come up nearer to hear what I had to say about foreign mat-ters[,] bowed and would not approach out of reverence for him” (II.137).Heco, in other words, was closer to the Prince and the greatness he representsthan the two Karo and the two attendant officers marked in the diagram asfour small squares far removed from the rectangular field (which probablyrepresents a “Brussels carpet” that covered half the floor) that enclosed Princeand Self. Yet what appears as reverence here could just as easily be read as thesamurais’ aversion towards either the imported Brussels carpet or the foreignstories that Heco was recounting.

Heco’s diary entries also refrain from offering insights into his actions andpsychological states. Early in the narrative, he occasionally pauses to take hisemotional bearings: “So since I was without any parent or relative to whomI might appeal for help, of myself I plucked up heart and faced the matter


Figure 2. Diagram of Heco’s meeting with the Prince of Higo, from Narrative of a JapaneseII.136. Reproduction courtesy of the Beinecke Library, Yale University.

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stoutly. And then I knew that from thenceforth I must look to myself, andthis was the day in my life when my cares began, and from that time theyhave continued ever on” (I.124). Later, he presents his movements and actionsas externally motivated, without any reference to his will or state of mind: “Ihad received several letters from Capt. Boothe, pressing me to visit him atAlexandria, and so on this day I went . . .”; “At Ösaka I found a letter request-ing me to return to Nagasaki. So I left . . .” (I.292, II.134). While the Nar-rative opens with an extended account of Heco’s desire for adventures andtravels outside of his native village, in his descriptions of his later travels, Hecosimply goes where he is summoned or ordered, or where he believes there ismoney to be made. In the following section, I will argue that Heco’s extrac-tion of his personal feelings and responses from his own narrative is informedby the democratic notion of “representative personality” that characterizesmainstream American autobiographies.

REPRESENTATIVE PERSONALITY ABROAD

—[W]ere it left to my choice, I should have no objection to go over thesame life from its beginning to the end, only asking the advantage authorshave of correcting in a second edition some faults of the first.

—Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Scholars of American literature have argued that autobiography plays a cru-cial role in mediating relationships between individual subjects and the dem-ocratic government that is supposed to represent their interests. Thus, RobertSayre writes that “Autobiography may be the preeminent kind of Americanexpression,” the literary production of a sovereign, democratic self (147). Yetthe exemplary self presented in canonized narratives also threatens to tyran-nize readers with an overwhelming normalizing drive. As Sacvan Bercovitchputs it, representative autobiographies have become “the canonized do-it-yourself guides to Americanization, handbooks to self-assertion that issue ina standardization of the self” (141).

Heco’s Narrative draws on this Western and largely American traditionof national autobiography, which is oriented towards what Mitchell Breit-weiser describes as an interest in “representative personality.” Breitweiseropens his study of two early American lives by suggesting that “A reasonablywell-read American living during the second quarter of the nineteenth-cen-tury would have been familiar with the thesis that the spirit or genius of ahistorical period can condense itself, spontaneously, in the person of a singlespokesman” (1).19 To meet the exigencies of this thesis, autobiographers


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selectively represented only those aspects of public subjectivity that conformto notions of equality, self-reliance, and formal freedom. Bercovitch provoca-tively describes the shedding of all personality traits that do not conform tothese ideas as “The Ritual of American Autobiography”:

The self projected by Edwards, Franklin, and Thoreau is neither discrete nor antag-onistic, but . . . self-effacing, exemplary, and self-transcending. There is an invita-tion lurking in each of them: how would you like to disappear?—to disappear intothe American army of Christ (Edwards), to disappear into American institutions(Franklin), to disappear into American nature (Thoreau). (142)

To the extent that Heco succumbs to the invitation to disappear into capi-talist institutions of formal equality and entrepreneurial self-reliance, hisNarrative urges its readers to follow his lead.

Heco’s decade-long absence from his homeland immediately sets himapart from Bercovitch’s examples of representative national personality, buthis activities after returning to Japan are strikingly reminiscent of BenjaminFranklin’s experiences. In addition to serving as a translator for a number offoreign diplomats, Heco authored a “monthly business circular”; fundedJapan’s first modern newspaper; published a brief autobiography entitledFloating on the Pacific (1863) in Japanese; provided detailed descriptions ofWestern telegraph, railroads, and steamers; procured Japanese plant speci-mens for Louis Agassiz; established several business ventures; helped establishJapan’s first mint in Osaka; and in collaboration with Alexander Allen Shand,drew up government regulations for Japanese banks (Calkin 18). Heco’sresourcefulness in identifying and inhabiting profitable positions resemblesthe industrious and calculating capacity for enterprise that Breitweiser asso-ciates with Franklin: “a traitless capacity that is the self, rather than a deviceat the disposal of a more familiar sort of character with quirks, preferences,desires, biases, and affections” (233). Furthermore, Heco envisions the veryprocess of editing and publishing his notebooks as a painstaking act of auto-biographical revision or self-extraction. In a brief editor’s preface to the Nar-rative, Murdoch reports that “some time in the spring of 1892, I was handedeight thin but closely-written note-books, with a request that I should extractfrom them all that was of more than purely personal interest, and if I deemedthe excerpts to made worthy of being made public, to see to the publicationof the same” (I.i). Just as Franklin and other American autobiographersattempted to foreground those aspects of their personalities that would bemost instructive and imitable for readers, Heco fashions himself as an exem-plary role model whose abstract personality both prefigures and facilitatesJapan’s entry into the global economic system.

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While there is no documentation of Heco’s having read Franklin’s Auto-biography, his interest in representative personalities is evinced by a requestfor biographies of Washington and Napoleon that he sent to an Americanbusiness associate in the 1870s.20 As early as 1863, Heco expressed admira-tion for Washington’s heroism—a heroism characterized by self-effacementin favor of the public interest: “a great hero named Washington was born inAmerica. . . . By nature, Washington was deeply compassionate, and he hadno self-interest . . . and was one who did not value his life when it came tohis people” (Floating 65).21 In the Narrative, Heco repeatedly evokes thissense of democratic character when describing his cordial and relativelyinformal meetings with presidents Pierce (I.140–43), Buchanan (I.150–52),and Lincoln (I.300–302): “For how could it be that the head man of amighty nation like the United States of America should live in such a simplemanner without any pomp or grandeur, nay, even, without guards or atten-dants[?]” (I.142). From such biographical studies, Heco learned that repre-sentative characters and national heroes whose lives were worthy of beingpublished and imitated were characterized by a tendency to sacrifice orobscure their self-interest in the face of an “unselfish devotion to the people”(67).22

The Narrative deploys several rhetorical strategies to fashion its hero as arepresentative personality. For instance, Heco carefully recopies several let-ters attesting to his character. The longest of these, a letter from his Americanbenefactor Beverly Sanders, concludes in the vein of a letter of recommenda-tion:

In taking leave of you, my dear boy, it affords me unfeigned pleasure to say thatfor the five or six years that I have known you, in the intimate relations which haveexisted between us, I have always and under all circumstances found you truthful,honorable, loyal and polite, courteous and appreciative, and entirely entitled to theconfidence and respect of your friends and of all men. (I.163)

Other recommendations and acknowledgments from both American andJapanese politicians, businessmen, ships’ captains, and diplomats attest tothe loyalty and efficiency with which Heco could serve the public interest.The significance attributed to such testimonies, and the frequency withwhich he changed occupations, suggest that Heco was speculating on him-self, collecting evidence that would bolster the reputation he would bring tofuture endeavors: his decision to spend six more years studying in the USinstead of waiting in China for a ship back to Japan, his refusal of an excel-lent salary at a boarding house in order to learn English with Sanders, and


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his application for US citizenship were all strategies by which Heco tried tomake himself upwardly mobile in a transitional Japan. Circulating through-out the Pacific and the US would enhance his value in terms of both salaryand international relations: “He [Sanders] said that if I went with him Icould learn the English language, and that in a few years Japan would sure-ly be opened, and then I could go back without any fear. He pointed outthat it was for my own interest as well as for the interest of the Governmentof Japan that I should return with a full knowledge of the foreigners’ lan-guage” (I.121).23

One of Heco’s rare first-person anecdotes dramatizes the relationshipbetween circulation and value in a capitalist economy, providing a moral alle-gory warning against the perils of Japan’s former isolationism. While adriftin the Pacific and unsure of whether they would be rescued, several crewmenon Heco’s ship

Went forward, opened the treasure-boxes, and got some of the gold coins. Theybrought them into the cabin and commenced to play cards with the coins as stakes.. . . But when the game was finished none of them gathered up the coins,—theyleft them scattered there and no one seemed to care for them. Like the true avari-cious gambler, each was anxious to win from his fellows, although their days wereapparently numbered; but realizing, when the excitement of greed was over, theutter uselessness of money to them in their plight they were quite indifferent totheir winnings. (50)

After learning here that gold that doesn’t circulate has no value, Heco laterdiscovers that his trips between Japan, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.enhance his own value as a cultural interpreter and business advisor. But—as I will show in the following sections—when describing his daily life inJapan’s treaty ports, Heco eventually registers that circulation and the valuethat it produces are both based on conditions of uneven trade and negotia-tion.

In addition to the evidence of character and entrepreneurial capacity thathe includes, Heco’s omissions provide important clues about his sense ofwhat was insignificant and “purely personal.” The diary of his friend Fran-cis Hall, for example, provides detailed accounts of their trips to the theater(283, 368), social calls (301–303, 353, 608), country outings (158, 358,609–615), visits to teahouses where they enjoyed the company of “all theavailable damsels of the household” (274, 303), and a stroll near the Gan-kiro, or brothels, where “the sight of two young ladies” had “consumed ourappetites” (346). Furthermore, Heco makes no mention at all of marriage

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to the eighteen-year-old Matsumoto Choko in 187724; instead, his diaryentries for that year are restricted to a detailed description of a court case inwhich he struggled to collect money loaned to a dishonest tea merchant (VanSant 47). Heco’s silence concerning such everyday social interactions andromantic relationships suggests that, to him, domestic life, leisurely excur-sions, and sexuality were of no public, political, or historical interest.

For Heco and his editor Murdoch, then, representative personality par-adoxically prioritized everything that was not of “purely personal interest.”Their publication, after all, was titled not “the narrative of Joseph Heco” butsimply and generically The Narrative of a Japanese: What he has Seen and thePeople he has Met in the Course of the Last Forty Years. Murdoch suggests thatthe author’s public importance lay not in his personality, but rather in hisuniquely doubled point of view: “Mr. Heco had unusual opportunities ofseeing and hearing things from two stand-points, from the native as well asthe foreign; opportunities of which he seems to have availed himself with nomean measure of shrewdness” (ii). Yet Murdoch’s reference to the author’sshrewdness registers the fact that all of Heco’s activities and writings reflectsome degree of “purely personal interest”25—John Van Sant, for example,cites numerous instances of Heco’s narrative unreliability in the course ofarguing that in all his political and business dealings, “Heco’s motivationappeared to be more personal than patriotic” (48). But Van Sant’s criticismconveys only a fragment of Heco’s dilemma, which was not only betweenthe self and the nation, but also between different audiences of collectiveidentifications: between the US and Japan, the aristocratic daimyo and theMeiji emperor, international capitalism and underdeveloped nations. Towhat extent is Heco’s disappearance from his Narrative (or even more alarm-ingly, from his personal notebooks) a measure of his tactical shrewdness inadapting to the demands of various interlocutors, audiences, and potentialenemies? This measure of shrewdness reminds us that Heco’s autobiographyalso participates in—and indeed helps initiate—a second, peripheral sub-genre of autobiography characterized by difference and injury rather thanrepresentativeness. For in addition to presenting exemplary instances ofRepublican virtue and Puritan self-reliance, autobiographical forms haveoften been appropriated by marginal writers such as fugitive slaves, politicalprisoners, and ethnic minorities to publicize injuries inflicted or enabled byuneven legal and economic systems. The following section turns to studiesof US imperialism and Asian American culture to frame Heco’s shrewdassimilation of American institutions as a strategy for the survival andadvancement not only of his own interests, but also of Japan’s nationalintegrity.


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FORMAL EQUALITY AND IMPERIAL CITIZENSHIP

[T]he need is not for a simple revision of American history that wouldaccommodate those who were excluded in the first writing of this history,such as Asian Americans. The need is to define a new paradigm which con-textualizes the history of Asian Americans within the . . . global history ofimperialism, of colonialism, and of capitalism. To isolate Asian Americanhistory from its international underpinnings, to abstract it from the glob-al context of capital and labor migration, is to distort this history.

—Sucheta Mazumdar

The Narrative of a Japanese, a text published four decades after Heco’s returnto Japan, extends the rhetoric and practices of representative personality tothe explicitly transnational and often racialized context of trans-Pacific voy-ages and Japanese treaty ports. During his extensive travels along the coast ofCalifornia and through New England, the White House, Panama, Macao,Hawai‘i, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, Heco witnessed firsthand the trajecto-ries by which Western capital, interests, and weapons were being brought tobear throughout Pacific ports. As a response to this international situationcharacterized by imperialist violence and uneven trade, Heco presents hisassimilation of American language, food, customs, institutions, and tech-nologies as a paradoxically patriotic act—the most effective tactic for ensur-ing his own eventual repatriation, as well as the only means by which Japancould resist Western imperialists and emerge as a modernized, sovereignnation. But on several occasions, he also acknowledges that merely adoptingAmerican practices and participating in international trade would never leadto equality with Western nations or their citizens.

The vogue for Japanese culture, traditions, and commodities that spreadthroughout New England in the 1880s and 1890s suggests that the Narra-tive’ s failure to attract any recognition in America may have had to do withits refusal to cater to the exoticism that characterized New England’s interestin Japan. For, as an early passage of Heco’s book demonstrates, the authorwas acutely aware of Americans’ troubling tendency to put Japanese cultureon display. Just after the Auckland brings Heco and the other castaways toSan Francisco harbor, a ship captain offers to take them to a dance in the city,asking them to change back into their native Japanese clothing. After beingled behind the curtain of a theater,

We remained quietly seated for a few minutes when some of my companions beganto get angry. And one would say to another:—“This captain of the store ship pre-tends to be our friend, but he is not. For he has brought us here to make a show ofus and to make money.” (I.94)

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Although the captain who rescued them convinces them to go through withthe exhibition, Heco’s account of the experience registers the castaways’embarrassment: “They all looked at us with eager eyes for some minutes, andthen turned to each other talking and laughing and gesticulating” (I.95).Afterwards, the spectators plied the castaways with money and gifts, provid-ing an early illustration of a cultural marketplace that rewarded the perform-ance and exaggeration of “traditional” Japanese traits.

Instead of offering the American reading public an exaggerated treatise onJapanese thought and behavior—such as Lafcadio Hearn provides in his crit-ically acclaimed Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life (1896)—ora performance of Japanese-ness along the lines of Onoto Watanna’s popularnovels, John Luther Long’s Madame Butterfly (1903), or Kakuzo Okakura’sBook of Tea (1906), Heco provides abundant evidence of his assimilation ofAmerican culture and institutions. Compared to the broken, deliberatelydistorted, and often well-received dialect English used by writers like Watan-na, Long, and Yone Noguchi, the prose of Heco’s text (thanks in part to Mur-doch’s revisions) seems standard; in fact, the text’s lack of stylistic idiosyn-crasies may be one reason for its failure to attract a readership. Furthermore,the opening chapters of the Narrative thematize Heco’s early assimilation ofWestern conventions. For example, when he tries on a set of Western cloth-ing, the second mate tells him

“Now you one Yankee boy!” and he smiled. I did not understand what he said atthe time, but I remembered the sound of the words and afterward I learned theirmeaning. This was the first time in my life that I had ever put on foreign clothing,and I felt much tightness about my body; still they were much warmer than myown garment, besides being more convenient for working. (I.79)

Heco’s sartorial transformation is here juxtaposed with his precociousassimilation of the English language, and he quickly adapts to the clothing byshifting his attention from its uncomfortable tightness to its efficiency. Later,the Narrative provides a similar account of being pressured into drinkingcow’s milk—which was considered an abomination by the Japanese: “I hadto obey, as all were standing round watching me. And I drank that milk, andwas greatly surprised to discover that it tasted so nice and soothing. And Ibegan to think that there were many more good things in the world than Ihad dreamt of” (I.145). This simple scene of transcultural Bildung takes onthe gravity of a moral fable as Heco learns (and subsequently teaches hisreaders) that globalization—which here takes the form of “many more goodthings in the world”—may seem unpalatable, but it is nice and soothinggoing down. But this exaggerated scene of pleasurable assimilation is one of


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the few moments when Murdoch took liberties with Heco’s notebooks: themanuscript version omits the last sentence, noting simply, “to my great sur-prise that it tasted so nice+soothing+from that time forward I used the milkalways+find it to be a nice beverage” (Notebooks IV.17). Assimilation, whichMurdoch intentionally exaggerates in this passage, is no less a Western impo-sition than self-exoticization.

Heco does more than simply refuse popular demand for representationsof Japanese traditions, philosophies, and oddities by foregrounding hisassimilation of American speech, clothing, and beliefs. For no sooner does heinvoke these stock scenes of immigrant Bildung than he abandons themthrough his act of narrative disappearance. The gradual eclipse of Heco’svoice and psyche during the course of his own autobiography can thus beseen not only as a move from self-absorption to public interest, but also as a

“Pleasurable assimilation” or “self-exoticization”? Undated photo-graphs of a young and a middle-aged Joseph Heco. Reprinted withthe permission of the Syracuse Uni-versity Library Special CollectionsResearch Center.

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formal interruption or failure reflecting social and international frictions.Lisa Lowe’s comments about formal dissonance in twentieth-century minor-ity fiction seem applicable to early Asian American autobiographies that, likeHeco’s, often failed to interest American audiences:

the structural location of U.S. minority literature may produce effects of disso-nance, fragmentation, and irresolution even and especially when that literatureappears to be performing a canonical function. Even those novels that can be saidto conform more closely to the formal criteria of the bildungsroman express a con-tradiction between the demand for a univocal developmental narrative and the his-torical specificities of racialization, ghettoization, violence, and labor exploitation.(100)

This resistance to the formal criteria of Bildung characterizes a number ofcritically underexamined nineteenth-century ethnic autobiographies. Like theeclipse of subjectivity that occurs in Heco’s Narrative, the flamboyant genderinversion of Noguchi’s American Diary of a Japanese Girl (1902) and the frag-mentary (if not pathological) form of Sui Sin Far’s “Leaves from the MentalPortfolio of an Eurasian” (1909)26 register discrepancies between ethnic expe-rience and the formal protocols of representative autobiography. It seems thatthe notions of exemplary selfhood and formal equality that underlie tradi-tional autobiographies were only available to ethnic authors willing to under-go rituals that they liken to mental illness, cross-dressing, and self-extraction.27

The peculiar circumstances of Heco’s naturalization illustrate the inter-national scope of this contradiction between formal equality and racial dif-ference. Although his naturalization marked a turning point in Heco’s polit-ical status, the Narrative provides only a typically deadpan description of theprocess:

June 7th. As the day for my departure to my native country drew near at hand, Mr.Sanders thought it best that I should be naturalized before I left Baltimore. So hetook me to the U.S. Court where I applied for and obtained a certificate of natu-ralization signed by the U.S. District Judge Gill and Mr. Spicer, Clerk of Court.And thus I became a citizen of the United States of America. (I.158)

Heco’s own agency is elided here, as he attributes the decision to become acitizen to his mentor Mr. Sanders, and the power to confer citizenship to thejudge and court clerk. Moreover, the reasoning and timing behind his natu-ralization effectively undercut the rights it accords him: Heco receives UScitizenship only when—and presumably only because—“the day for my depar-ture to my native country drew near.” In other words, his naturalization wasoccasioned by his departure from the US, and intended to make him a more

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effective agent in the “opening” of Japan to uneven international commerce.This is not normative US citizenship, but a compromised situation that DavidKazanjian describes in terms of “imperial U.S. citizenship.”28

Naturalized and effectively exiled from the territorial US at the same time,Heco experienced a form of mobility that Sau-ling Cynthia Wong character-izes in terms of politically and economically inflected (if not inflicted) neces-sity. Wong’s distinction between mainstream American understandings ofmobility as a form of extravagance and the representation of “mobility asnecessity” in Asian American literature suggests that Heco’s various geograph-ical and professional dislocations contributed to the elision of his sense ofself. Wong’s reading of Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart (1946), forexample, argues that his forced mobility (“continually walking, running, hitch-ing rides, shuttling back and forth”) produces a corresponding flatness at thelevel of characterization:

The meticulousness with which the author records the place names along the narra-tor’s accidental itineraries contrasts strangely with his perfunctory characterizationand emplotment. Key figures like Carlos’s brothers or socialist mentors or femalebenefactors are scarcely more developed than casual acquaintances. Emotions andmotifs are attributed without elaboration. Events that should, in commonsenselogic, vary in significance are indiscriminately described in an unmodulated prose.Amount of detail is not proportionate to the event’s alleged developmental import.(134)

Wong’s account of the psychological and stylistic effects of Bulosan’s travelsaptly describes the unmodulated flatness of Heco’s prose—as well as his con-stant shuttling back and forth between nations, employers, and loyalties.

The racial and national differences that qualified Heco’s citizenship arealso evident in several moments of discord in his relations with the Americanconsulate in Japan. On the one hand, Townsend Harris, the US Minister toJapan, tells a Japanese official that Heco is to be accorded all the rights ofextraterritoriality enjoyed by US citizens—“And ever from that hour to thepresent I have been treated as such throughout all occasions by the authori-ties,” writes Heco (I.201).29 But although the Japanese authorities alwaystreated him as a US citizen, his treatment by American officials was a differ-ent story. Heco reports, for example, that the Consulate paid him a deflatedsalary, and refused his request for an “exchange allowance” that would set itright (I.309–310, 331–32). At a dinner party hosted by E. M. Dorr, theConsul of Kanagawa (and Heco’s employer at the time), Heco’s right to speakhis mind is curtailed when he refers to a captain who mistreated him duringhis travels as “that unprincipled man H_____” (I.218). Dorr responds by

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threatening to kick [Heco] out through that door!” for insulting his friend.What follows is the Narrative’ s only explicit discussion of Heco’s curtailedrights as an imperial US citizen:

I replied that I was sorry that he was the Consul’s friend, and that I was merelyexpressing my private opinion of the man based on his treatment of me whilst Iwas on board his vessel, and asked if I had not a perfect right to express my opin-ion of a man who had decidedly been no friend to me.

“No, you have not,—not in that way” said the consul. (I.218)

The dispute is only settled after Heco’s Southern friend Captain Brooke inter-feres and challenges the consul to a duel (Dorr declines, but does not apolo-gize to Heco). Heco’s rights among Japanese authorities do not guarantee himthe basic right of expressing his private opinion among white Americans, forhis race and subservient position bar him from social equality. Thus, while heboldly begins an unsolicited letter to President Buchanan, “I take the libertyto address you a few lines,” Heco still signs the letter (which Buchanan neveranswered) by acknowledging both his subalternity and his racial coding as‘Your Obdt Sevt/ Joseph Heco/ (Japanese Boy).” Even after attaining US cit-izenship, Heco remains subject to the mistreatment and disrespect that heencountered in earlier episodes of the narrative, as when racist sentimentsagainst the Chinese lead a ship’s crew to treat the Japanese castaways rough-ly. A friend explains to Heco that “the Chinese are a greedy and a cringingrace, and to make money will submit to any treatment,—even to being kickedand beaten like beasts. Wherefore the people of the Susquehanna fancied thatwe were folks of the same spirit, or rather want of spirit, and they treated usin the same fashion as they treated the Chinese” (I.115).

Heco’s travels throughout various Western “spheres of influence” in thecircum-Pacific world brought him in contact with numerous instances ofcolonial power. Both aboard ships and in ports like San Francisco and Balti-more, he witnessed racialized labor in the form of Chinese cooks, “coolies,” achain gang, Mexican slaughterhouse workers, a black bartender, and planta-tion slavery.30 He also witnessed and imagined scenes of brutal colonial vio-lence, as when he reports that “I once saw the war between Mekishiko [Mex-ico] and America from a distance; and I was on a warship which was firingits guns,” and even provides an illustration of that battle (Floating 19–21).31

Heco similarly notes the uneven development that followed from the annex-ation of Hong Kong after the first Opium War: “This land was taken byEngland after the opium-tobacco disorder, and is now the property of Eng-land. The houses of the foreigners are beautiful, but the houses of the Chi-nese are extremely shabby” (36). Towards the end of his 1863 narrative,


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Heco contrasts the Sandwich Islands with China in order to warn his Japan-ese readers of the consequences of “rudeness” towards Westerners. BecauseJapan’s government “is on friendly terms with the various [Western] nations. . . it is impossible for any nation to be hostile to it and to despise it.” Onthe other hand, “Since China takes rudeness to other countries to be a man-ifestation of national pride, no country came to China’s aid when the Eng-lish-French war against China occurred; she ended up soundly defeated andis despised and treated lightly by all other countries” (62). Since the isola-tionism that had dominated Japan’s foreign policy for centuries was nolonger feasible, Heco recommends treating foreigners with politeness andcivility as a form of diplomatic damage control, a means of ensuring thatJapan would only be partially occupied and economically exploited by theWest, rather than conquered and annexed.

In fact, these scattered but sometimes extended descriptions of variousscenes of imperial and racial domination constitute one of the most signifi-cant factors in Murdoch’s revision of Heco’s autobiography. Passages fromthe notebooks describing race relations in Hawai‘i, Nicaragua, and Canton—passages that seem implicitly addressed to Japanese readers curious about theWestern world (rather than to American readers curious about The Narrativeof a Japanese )—are consistently omitted from the published account. Forexample, Heco describes the racial results of miscegenation in San Juan delSur, as well as the economic results of Spanish imperialism, at some length:“The inhabitants are all black,+are said to be mixed race of Spanish, Indian,+Mexican. The town having about 60 huts+buildings,+it looked poor+mis-erable” (Notebooks IV.11).32 Murdoch also omits an extended descriptionof Heco’s experiences when he is briefly left behind in Hawai‘i. Among otherthings, Heco describes and includes a sketch drawing of Oahu College, andvisits Hawai‘i’s Parliament, noting how natives and naturalized foreignersgovern collaboratively (Notebooks VI.8–10). Whereas Heco’s recopied note-books actively add details and illustrations to this scene as if to expand theirsignificance to his themes, Murdoch omits these and other descriptions ofregions that Heco visited in between his “destinations” in Japan and the US.Instead, Murdoch adds more detailed, ghostwritten accounts of Japan’s localcolor that are presumably addressed to Western readers, introducing longerdescriptions of the traditional funeral of Heco’s mother and of a nostalgicvisit to his home village later in his life.

Heco’s writings thus situate the problem of compromised citizenship—a problem that has been at the heart of Asian American literary criticism—within the contexts of nineteenth-century US imperialism and the MeijiRestoration:


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The granting of citizenship can be no guarantee of Asian American representation,for legal inclusion only recognizes national competence in the formal or “techni-cal” sense. Although the law necessarily ensures the contractual terms of citizen-ship in abstraction, it can hardly change the cultural condition of Asian Americanabjection [or] the psychocultural aspects of subject constitution. (Li 11)

Although he addresses issues of cultural assimilation in the US, representativepersonality, and the racist curtailment of rights that have become key con-cerns in twentieth-century ethnic autobiographies, Heco’s juxtaposition ofthese issues with his overarching desire to return to Japan sets him apart fromthe cultural nationalism that has been criticized in many later Asian Ameri-can writers and critics. When Heco finally returned to Japan in 1859, bothhis own citizenship and the integrity of his country were bound up withdynamics of uneven trade, forced modernization, and foreign relations. In asense, he never returned to his homeland at all—for he came as an Americanto live a restricted life in the treaty port of Yokohama, in a country on theverge of civil war. His personality fades into the background of the Narrativein part because his conversion to Christianity and naturalization as a US cit-izen deprived him of many ties to Japanese society, while the persistence ofracist ideologies among his American acquaintances—as well as his distancefrom his friends in San Francisco and Baltimore—marginalized him from hisnewly adopted national community. Heco, who spoke out against isolation-ism all his life, ironically ended up culturally and socially isolated upon hislong-awaited return to Japan.

GEOGRAPHICAL BELONGING

October 28th. About 6.40 a.m. we felt the shock of earthquake inTökiö, that laid the prefectures of Gifu and Aichi in ruins.

—Joseph Heco, final diary entry in The Narrative of a Japanese

Not long after he settles into his job as interpreter at the consulate, Hecohears that his friend and fellow castaway “Dan” (or Denkichi), who had beenworking as an interpreter for the British Legation, was assassinated by a dis-affected samurai. Townsend Harris’s interpreter Henry Heusken is assassi-nated soon afterwards. As a result of these and other assaults on foreigners,merchants, and interpreters, Heco writes that

I had been frequently warned by the native authorities . . . to be careful of myself. . . not to ride out on the Tökaidö, or to any place at all distant from the ForeignSettlement, inasmuch as it was a well-ascertained fact that several rönin deemed meworthy of their attention, and were on the outlook for me to cut me down. [These]warnings had of late waxed far too frequent for my comfort. (I.278)


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In 1861, Heco decided to return to the US for a time, partly to put some dis-tance between himself and potential assassins, and “partly to obtain the postof U.S. Naval store-keeper, inasmuch as this position would entitle me togold bands on my cap and so place me on an equality with the native offi-cials” (I.278). But when, having failed to obtain his promotion, Heco returnsto Japan a year later, he finds that the atmosphere has only become tenser.Volume II of the Narrative opens with a sense of impending crisis: the UScoat of arms is secretly removed from the Consulate overnight, an Americanwarship (with Heco on board) attacks an antiforeign territory along the Straitsof Shimonoseki, the English fleet sails to Satsuma to “exact reparation” for afatal attack on British citizens, and Heco himself is explicitly marked for assas-sination:

August 10th. To-day, I was specially warned by the native authorities of Yokohamato be careful not to leave the town for any distance, and not to venture out on theKanagawa side at all, inasmuch as there were several Choshiu men wanderingabout in the neighbourhood, with intent to slay six marked men, of whom I wasone. They went on to tell me how two days before the Kanagawa authorities haddiscovered a gory, clotted human head in a wayside privy on the Tökaidö, with thefollowing notice attached to it: —“This is the head of one of the Pilots who went onthe American Ship-of-war to Shimonoseki on the 13th July and fought against his owncountrymen on the 16th of the same month. There are five more men at large who areto be served in the same fashion.” (II.1–2)

Heco is again restricted to the narrow limits of Yokohama, seldom leavingthe complex, and traveling only by day, and usually with guards. The TökaidöRoad, which politically, geographically, and aesthetically—as in Hiroshige’scelebrated woodcuts of Fifty-Three Stations of the Tökaidö (1833–1834)—wove together the Japanese nation by connecting the Shogun’s residence inKyoto to the imperial center of Edo, was completely off-limits to him. Thus,like most of Japan’s other resident foreigners, Heco learns of current eventsprimarily through hearsay, correspondence, and foreign newspapers.

In fact, even the authority of Heco’s sources sometimes seems question-able; for example, he transcribes a long “statement” that he solicits from “anative physician” explaining contemporary Japanese politics. As the situationin Japan becomes increasingly violent after 1865, Heco’s diary entries increas-ingly begin with the refrain, “It is reported that . . .” (I.315). Many of hisentries also consist of extracts from a monthly business circular that he pub-lished for foreigners in Yokohama, which consisted of secondhand reportssuch as the following: “Gloomy and perplexing rumours are almost of dailyoccurrence” (I.313); “It is a matter of common talk among the natives that


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the Shogun’s position is a very delicate one” (I.314). Such unidentified“native” sources undercut Heco’s authority as a cultural interpreter of Japan’scrisis, for they repeatedly remind us that he experienced very little of itdirectly.

But it was not only the danger of assassination that separated Heco fromhis Japanese informants. His Western style of dress and imperfect pronunci-ation of Japanese often led Japanese strangers to assume he was a Westerner.Early in the Narrative, other Japanese castaways are amazed to hear him speaktheir native language. Later on, when he visits his hometown almost twodecades after he was shipwrecked, a crowd that included several of Heco’sown relatives “anxiously [try] to make out which was the foreigner and whichwas I. But it seemed they could not” (II.132). Far from opening up to him,his old neighbors and relatives shy away, since they “could not distinguishwhich was I, and seemed to be sadly afraid, for they stood apart whisperingto each other, and bowed to us all as we passed on.” Elsewhere, Heco’s dra-matic reunion with his brother is briefly postponed by his brother’s failure torecognize him, for he was “much altered in dress, manner, and appearance”(II.209). But perhaps the most formidable barrier between Heco and hisnative country was language, for although he was able to perform his dutiesas a consular interpreter, it seems that his long absence from Japan took a tollon Heco’s proficiency in Japanese.33 Thus, in the 1863 preface to Floating,Heco reports that “I could not write in Japanese, having been thirteen whenI drifted away” (xi). He wrote his Japanese-language narrative in consultationwith a friend, and reiterates in the concluding pages that “It is my hope tolearn to read and write in Japanese, to become a Japanese as time goes by”(63). Yet by the last years of his life, many Japanese citizens had taken to refer-ring to Heco as Amerika Hikozo, effectively identifying him with and throughhis ties to America.

Although Heco never did “become a Japanese” by requesting a changein citizenship, the activities and enterprises he engaged in contributed to thenational consciousness of other Japanese subjects. As much as they indicatehis distance from many of his sources, Heco’s indirect reports based on gos-sip, rumor, and “common talk” simultaneously give voice to the modernJapanese nation, offering a running commentary on Japan’s political atmos-phere at the time. The constant circulation of anonymous and often uncon-firmed rumors creates not only anxiety and uncertainty, but an unprece-dented sense of national community. The national scene—embodied by thevariegated rumors and reports to which its struggles give rise—comes toreplace Heco himself as the protagonist and narrator of the Narrative. Heco’sforays into newspaper publishing played a key role in producing a sense of


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national community. For as Anderson points out, the calendrical sense oftime and the national scope of interest embodied in the newspaper compriseone of the indispensable rituals of nation-building:

The significance of this mass ceremony—Hegel observed that newspapers servemodern man as a substitute for morning prayers—is paradoxical. It is performedin silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware thatthe ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or mil-lions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has notthe slightest notion. . . . What more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked,imagined community can be envisioned? (Imagined 35)

Heco’s publishing endeavors, however, do not seamlessly fit Anderson’saccount of national newspapers. For, as its title indicates, Heco’s Kaigai Shim-bun primarily reported news from “overseas” translated into Japanese; con-versely, his business circular provided news of Japan’s internal politics writ-ten in English. Thus, while the two periodicals certainly contributed to thedevelopment of a sense of homogeneous, “calendrical” time among theirreaders, the imagined community that they helped give form to cannot becharacterized in strictly national terms.34 Instead, it was a community com-prised of international merchants and diplomats, as well as a considerablenumber of samurai who were becoming increasingly interested in learningabout Western technologies and practices.

Yet the Japanese nation whose murmurings can be heard in Heco’s tran-scribed rumors makes for an unstable and indefinite protagonist. For Heco’sautobiography coincided with the tense and often violent decades surround-ing Japan’s Meiji Restoration, as well as the continual threat posed to Japan’ssocial and religious systems by incursions of Western technologies, institu-tions, beliefs, and violence. The caste system that rigidly distinguished betweensamurai and commoners was receding before an increasingly influential classof bourgeois merchants and bankers with international ties. Only a few yearsafter commanding the Shogunate to “expel the foreigners,” the emperordefeated the Shogun’s supporters with the help of Western ironclads and can-nons purchased from the West, leftovers from the Opium Wars and the USCivil War. Towards the end of the Narrative, Heco begins to make one morechange in tone, adding episodes of both personal and national nostalgia thatcomplicate the diary’s flow of homogeneous calendrical time. For the Meijiregime’s adoption of foreign institutions and technologies—much like Heco’sadoption of US citizenship—was originally intended as a paradoxical act ofpatriotism captured by the popular slogan wakon yosai (“Japanese spirit, West-ern technology”). The only way for Japan to survive its late, forced entry into


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the capitalist world-system was by assimilating Western technologies andpractices without relinquishing its own national identity. Thus, Heco reportsthat the Empress’s public appearance in Western clothing was accompaniedby “a semi-official notice . . . alleging that ‘the dress the Empress then worehad been worn by the ancient Japanese’” (238). This proclamation linkingmodern, Western fashion to ancient Japanese tradition epitomizes a logic oftemporal non-contemporaneity and spatial heterogeneity that increasinglyinterests Heco in the latter portions of his Narrative.

This complex articulation of modernity with nostalgia saturates Heco’sextended and uncharacteristically personal account of his long-awaited visitto his native village. In the opening lines of the Narrative, Heco simultane-ously describes and mourns the village of Komiya, noting that at the time ofhis writing the “good-sized village” of his childhood “has now dwindled toabout one-seventh of its former size and importance” (I.1). But it is not until1868 that Heco receives permission to make the trip into the countryside,where he experiences a mutual lack of recognition. Not only did the villagersfail to make out “which was the foreigner and which I,” but Heco himselfbarely recognizes the landscape of his memory:

Alas! Alas.35 How things seemed to have changed. When I left the village in 1850,to my boyish eyes the houses had seemed large and splendid, and the street a mag-nificent one. . . . But now what a disillusioning!! The houses mean, and low, andalmost squalid in appearance, the magnificent street of my boyish days a merecommon roadway. For apart altogether from my exaggerated ideas of the size andappearance of the place when I left it, it had really decayed since 1850. Then itcounted 62 houses; now it numbered no more than 30, and many of these lookedonly too like going the way of the two-and-thirty that had vanished. (II.132)

Yoshimura explains that the village’s decay resulted from fluctuations in theprice of cotton, as well as heavy levies that were exacted to finance rebellionsagainst the Emperor (341).36 The first of these changes—Komiya’s overde-pendence on cotton farming—was in part a result of the commercializationof Japanese agriculture for export, and the pronounced rise and fall of pricesworldwide during the US Civil War.37 Heco’s melancholy response to hisdiminished hometown (“I found but small joy in my visit to my native town”)can be read not only as a result of his disappointed expectations, but also asa symptom of his ambivalent involvement with the very forces of modern-ization and foreign commerce that have depleted the village (II.133).

But the Narrative refuses to offer an explicit economic or geopoliticalmetanarrative with which to make sense of Heco’s growing nostalgia in thefinal decades of his life. It does, however, gesture towards a unifying thread


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in a brief final entry of his autobiography/chronicle. Apparently written aftera five-month lapse, “we felt the shock of earthquake in Tökiö” is distin-guished by the unusual presence of the pronoun “we.” After recounting hisalienation from Japan, and then himself fading into the background of hisdiary, why does Heco conclude his narrative by obliquely invoking a com-munal identity? Even if he is only referring to his family, this autobiograph-ical use of the communal pronoun is almost unprecedented in Heco’s text.The earthquake gives material form to the dislocations that Heco and muchof Japan had been experiencing for decades. Edo had become Tokyo, thenational capital had shifted from Kyoto to Tokyo, and the power that onceresided in the center of the country was rivaled (if not dwarfed) by immensearmies and navies whose force was itself increasingly a function of speed,movement, and maneuvers that covered unimaginable transoceanic distances.It also expresses the pervasive sense of dislocation or deterritorialization thatHeco, his fellow castaways, and later his Japanese neighbors (whatever theirloyalties) felt as the landed aristocracy gave way before modern laws andinstitutions based on a combination of formal equality and uneven develop-ment. Japan’s grasp—and exploitation—of both the spirit and the practiceof Western ideologies is evident in the transformation of its relations withboth the West and other East Asian countries at the turn of the last century.Heco’s Narrative, after all, appeared during the years of the Sino-JapaneseWar, which resulted in the consolidation of Japan’s colonial influence inKorea and Taiwan—the establishment of an intra-Asiatic system of domi-nance, racial coding, and uneven development modeled on the dislocationsthat Japan had suffered earlier in the century. The 1890s also saw the revi-sion of the “unequal treaties” that granted Western nations and their repre-sentatives unprecedented rights of extraterritoriality and universal status as“most favored nation.”38 Although his autobiography has exerted very littleinfluence in literary circles, it registers the ideological effects of democraticpersonality, racialization, and geographical dislocation, which all con-tributed to the startlingly rapid growth of both Japan’s “democratic” insti-tutions and its empire.

However, comparing the Narrative with Heco’s manuscripts unsettleseven this tenuous sense of a national identity forged by a shared experience ofdislocation. For Heco’s second set of manuscripts ends not with the October1890 earthquake, but rather with an entry dated “Jany 27th [1889]” dealingwith Heco’s difficulties with the Tokyo police, who questioned his right toreside as a foreigner in Tokyo (where he had relocated on his physician’s rec-ommendation):


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What a humbug the diplomacy is, there is a treaty of ‘amity+friendship’ betweenthe two gov’ts,+yet one of their countrymen is sick with nervous disease+wants tolive where his physician commands in the open part,+yet he can’t get that priviledge[sic] to live—except in one of the corner—so called a Foreign Concession. (Rewrit-ten Notebooks III.185)

This passage—omitted from the Narrative—calls into question Heco’s veryright to speak as “a Japanese”: clearly, the Japanese officials do not see him asone of their “countrymen” at all. Indeed, the emotional center of this unpub-lished passage—a sort of alternative, private conclusion to the autobiography—is the term “countrymen,” which evokes Heco’s non-belonging with respectto both the Japanese he lives among and the Americans who naturalized himat the moment of his departure. Recognizing, perhaps, that his attempts tocreate an international public sphere have elided his very sense of self, Hecoexhibits no interest in shared events (like the 1890 earthquake), internation-al relations, or even a national community; instead, he merely reports thatone of “my native friends” finally obtains permission for him to “live in thecity peacefully—without troubling others+annoyance from police inquiry”(Rewritten Notebooks III.185). Heco’s attempt to invent himself as a repre-sentative personality for a modernizing Japan has run aground, and the selfhe has attempted to extract from his autobiography speaks here from behindthe scenes of his published Narrative, bewailing the failure of cultural diplo-macy and asking only to be left alone to live a private, untroubled life.


Heco in old age, wearing the great seal of the UnitedStates. Undated photograph. Reprinted with the per-mission of the Syracuse University Library Special Col-lections Research Center.

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NOTES

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Thanks to Lisa Szefel and Edlie Wong for their thoughtful comments onearly drafts of this project; the staff of the Tenri Library, for enthusiastically accom-modating my interest in Heco’s manuscripts; Yale University’s Griswold Research Fundand the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for financial support; Sugandhi Aish-warya and Ghatte Pallavi for research assistance; and Walter Edwards for generouslyfacilitating and even directly contributing to every stage of my archival research.

1. A few decades earlier, the translator of the German volume, Ernst Oppert, had attempt-ed (with financial support from the American businessman F. H. B. Jenkins) to rob atomb in Korea and hold its sacred contents hostage in order to force the opening oftrade relations. This episode suggests the extent to which Heco’s narrative would haveappealed to foreigners interested in exploiting Asian markets.

2. Benfey provides a suggestive series of case studies focusing on US cultural appropria-tions of Japan; for a discussion of earlier American material, visual, and textual render-ings of Japan in the 1860s and 1870s, see Guth.

3. See, for example, Pease, Dimock, Kaplan, and Appadurai.

4. For biographical accounts of Heco’s career, see Oaks, Plummer, Calkin, and Van Sant.Akira Yoshimura’s 1999 historical novel Amerika Hikozo (which was translated andpublished as Storm Rider in 2004) retells Heco’s story in meticulous detail, but thebook has received a lukewarm reception among American readers, who complain thatthe protagonist simply lacks personality and emotional depth.

5. The only other volume that Yokohama Printing and Publishing Co. seems to have pub-lished was Photographic Work of Kazumasa Ogawa (ca. 1898), which also featured edi-torial commentary by Heco’s editor, James Murdoch. The American-Japanese Pub-lishing Association in San Francisco, which reissued the Narrative in 1950, does notseem to have published anything else.

6. Maruzen, which today remains one of the leading distributors of Anglophone texts inJapan, traces its origins to Yukichi Fukuzawa, an educator and intellectual who endorsedJapan’s selective adoption of Western technologies and institutions. In the 1880s, Maru-zen had already published Hyakka Zensho, a twelve-volume compendium of Westernknowledge, as well as a translation of Chambers’s Information for the People.

7. This introductory page continues with paragraphs detailing Japan’s belligerent isola-tionism, its geography, its system of rule (split between the Shogunate and emperor),and its political hierarchy.

8. While Murdoch was a socialist and occasional antiracist journalist, his interest in Japanseems more aesthetic than politicized: among his publications are a volume of verseentitled Don Juan in Japan ; a novel entitled Ayame-san ; the captions to three books ofphotographs entitled Scenes of Open-Air Life in Japan, The Nikko District, and TheHakone District ; and an unfinished History of Japan that includes a detailed treatmentof the nation’s early foreign contacts. For a detailed biography of Murdoch, see Sissons.

9. A transcription by Chikamori Haruyoshi of one of Heco’s letters, for example, reads“Since Uniting waiting to-day for ‘Ida D. Royers’ I have nothing in my of receipt toacknowledge. By the ‘Kioka’ I sent you my Price Current of this market” (Miyoshi 12).


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10. Makita provides a thorough description of Heco’s manuscripts at the Tenri Library.Briefly, Heco’s earliest draft is in the form of eight notebooks containing all the eventsrecounted in volume 1 of the published Narrative, while the second draft takes theform of three bound volumes that include a carefully handwritten (and lightly revised)copy of the earlier notebooks, followed by relatively undigested diary entries that covermost of the experiences recounted in volume 2 of the Narrative. Because only the pub-lished Narrative is widely available to readers, I will focus on quotations from that ver-sion except when Murdoch’s alterations seem substantial.

11. The way in which Heco’s hand fills each notebook page, leaving scant margins, sug-gests that his diary also functioned as an exercise for improving his English composi-tion—a skill that would serve him well in providing written translations upon dozensof occasions after returning to Japan.

12. For a concise history and documentation of this international context, see Duus.

13. The narrative of Heco’s shipwreck bears comparison with other narratives by repatri-ated Japanese castaways who had traveled abroad. The only other castaway who spenta considerable period of time in the US was John Manjiro, whose account of his unin-tended 1841–1851 experience as a castaway, student, sailor, and gold prospector hasrecently been translated into English in a beautiful illustrated volume entitled DriftingTowards the Southeast. For a comparative discussion of Manjiro and Heco, see Human-ity above Nation: The Impact of Manjiro and Heco on America and Japan.

14. Heco’s vacillation about whether to translate the names of his native village and regionindicates an ambivalence as to his intended audience: in the earlier manuscript, hecrossed out “Ancient Temple” and replaced it with “Ko-omiya,” and similarly replaced“Beachfield” with “Hamada” (Notebooks I.2; see Figure 1). In his rewritten notebooks,Heco returns to the translated place names, but Murdoch evidently used the earlier setof eight notebooks in compiling the first volume of the Narrative.

15. In the published version, Murdoch has edited or omitted many of Heco’s regular ref-erences to the date, while leaving out all such entries prior to June 1858 (I.157).Although Heco’s notebooks include a few diary-like entries before 1858, their irregu-larity (they are often a year apart) and length (they often cover broad expanses of time,rather than the events of a single day or week) associate them more with the form of anextended prose narrative than a diary. Murdoch provides a probable explanation of thisstylistic shift in his preface: “The first two [notebooks] contained all that the writercould recall of his childhood in old Japan, of his being cast-away and picked up andtaken to America, and of what befell him there. The remaining six formed a portion ofthe regular diary which Mr. Heco has kept ever since the time he began to write Eng-lish” (I.i). To some extent, the stylistic and formal differences between the early andlater parts of the Narrative can be explained by the fact that Heco either composed orrevised the first chapters towards the end of his life, whereas the later diary entries showfewer signs of revision. However, the fact that the early sections were revised does notaccount for either the autobiographical form favored for the revisions, or the imper-sonal and detached style of Heco’s diary entries.

16. Although Heco claims that he began publishing the newspaper in 1864, in his extensivestudy of early Japanese newspapers, Jonas persuasively argues that the Kaigai Shimbun


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actually appeared in 1865 (50–53). In addition to business news, Heco’s newspaperincluded passages from Genesis translated into Japanese (Plummer 242).

17. The Japanese people, however, were by no means happy to relinquish their relativelyunregulated “time to live”: Heco reports that in 1873, tens of thousands of peasantsand samurai rioted throughout Japan in response to Western-influenced reforms thatincluded land taxes, conscription laws, and the official adoption of the solar calendar(II.178–81).

18. Even when he was a castaway, Heco’s movements were largely determined by what theUS believed to be diplomatically expedient. On the notion of “using” the castaways(who were moved from ship to ship and port to port like cargo) to open commercialintercourse with Japan, see Plummer 224.

19. Ralph Waldo Emerson eloquently articulates this thesis in Representative Men (1850),a series of biographical lectures that explore the premise that “Men have a pictorial orrepresentative quality, and serve us in the intellect” (6). The titles of Emerson’s lecturesevoke his sense that representative individuality involves the simultaneous establish-ment of a type: “Plato, or the Philosopher”; “Swendenborg, or the Mystic”: “Mon-taigne, or the Skeptic,” etc. In addition to the scholars quoted, Buell also provides asophisticated overview of Americans’ “persistent tendency to figure the self in exem-plary or representative terms” (268).

20. “Macondray sent Heco products for resale in Japan, and Heco in turn sent goods oncommission to Macondray. Heco requested garden seeds and multiple copies of Eng-lish language books, including biographies of Washington and Napoleon, atlases, anddictionaries. In return, he sent Macondray Japanese porcelain, paper, and even Japan-ese fishing rods” (Oaks 57).

21. The first appendix to the 1863 narrative that Heco published in Japanese presents anextended (though often inaccurate) account of the history and institutions of America’sdemocratic government (64–69).

22. Given the relationship between the notion of representative personality and Puritantraditions of exemplary selfhood and spiritual autobiography, Heco’s projection of arepresentative self may also have been influenced by his conversion to Christianity in1854. For Joseph Heco selected and received his very name when he was baptized atthe ardent request of Mrs. Sanders: “There we met Father—I forget his name—whoushered us into a little closet, a little enclosed box-like place. Here he questioned meon various matters and points. Then he told me to select a name out of those he readfrom a book and repeated. Several of the names he repeated did not sound nice, and allseemed to be the same. At length he came to, and read out the name of ‘Joseph.’ Thatsounded so pleasant to my ears that I at once said ‘that name will do for me’” (147).Heco acquires his Christian name and sense of self after being led into a space of exag-gerated privacy, “a little enclosed box-like place,” and interrogated about his personalhistory and beliefs. Although Heco retains his usual tone of detached nonchalance dur-ing this (supposedly) momentous event—forgetting the Father’s name, for example,and noting that “all [the names in the Bible] seemed to be the same”—he neverthelessresponds instantly and pleasurably to the name Joseph.


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Tomi Suzuki has argued that, along with Western literary influences, Christianityplayed a crucial role in the development of the autobiographical narrative genre knownas the shi-shösetsu or “I-novel” in Japan. While the “I-novel” did not emerge until theearly twentieth century, Suzuki traces its origins to earlier developments: “The notionof the individual self as an independent ethical and moral subject (subjectum ), a notionthat played a key role in the transformation of the larger literary and cultural discourse,emerged in the late 1880’s-early 1890’s in reaction to this newly defined, limited polit-ical subject [i.e., the equal subjects subsumed beneath the emperor]—a reaction aidedby the spread of Christianity, and, in particular, Protestantism” (33).

23. On the link between personal credibility and national ideology in Franklin’s Autobiog-raphy, see Baker: “Drawing from his own experience as a financier, Franklin depicts apublic credibility that is bolstered by his own credibility: the more reputable his ownname and success story, the more viable is the American life for which he is aspokesman” (288–89). Heco’s Narrative is motivated by a similar hope that his ownpersonal traits and the success that they brought would be imitated by an internation-al community of students, entrepreneurs, and politicians in Japan.

24. Heco only mentions his family in passing in the Narrative : “on Feb. 4th [of 1888], Itook passage on the Yamashiro-maru for myself and family” (I.243).

25. Etymologically, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “shrewd” carries conno-tations of depravity, harshness, and mischief as well as cleverness.

26. Viet Nguyen notes that “Sui Sin Far’s autobiographical essay . . . cannot be called anautobiography in the classical sense, not simply because of its length but because of itsfragmentary form and the particular, incomplete narrative it chooses to tell” (41).According to Nguyen, “Leaves” expresses an individuality opposed to “the abstract,atomized type of individuality favored by American capitalism” (42).

27. These anomalous “failed” autobiographies complicate Elaine Kim’s useful but somewhatreductive description of early Asian American authors as “ambassadors of goodwill”whose “writing is characterized by efforts to bridge the gap between East and West andplead for tolerance by making usually highly euphemistic observations about the Weston the one hand while explaining Asia in idealized terms on the other” (24). Kim pres-ents a lucid account of the conventions—and the ideological emphasis on free circula-tion and diplomatic “goodwill”—that relatively unpopular authors like Heco eitherfailed to capitalize on or refused.

28. Kazanjian explains that the formal equality supposedly granted by US citizenship andits democratic ideology was constitutively linked to the production and maintenance ofracial and national difference: “imperial U.S. citizenship is animated by a notion ofequality that is intimately articulated with the seemingly opposed notions of racial andnational codification” (215).

29. Heco’s decision to become a US citizen was probably a response to Japan’s policy ofsakoku or national seclusion, under which Japanese subjects were forbidden from trav-eling abroad or associating with Christians. According to Yoshimura’s meticulouslyresearched historical novel, while passing through Nanjing, Heco and his fellow cast-aways met another castaway named Rikimatsu who had been fired upon by the Japan-ese when an American ship attempted to repatriate him (73). Although Japan had been


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officially “opened” by the time of Heco’s naturalization, his previous conversion toChristianity would have made repatriation as a Japanese seem especially risky.

30. Regarding Heco’s often uncritical views on race, see Van Sant 36–38. Although Hecooften reaffirms racial codifications of black and Chinese laborers, I would suggest thatat another level he must have felt (if not recognized) the tension between his own com-prador position and his attempts to identify with his white benefactors and their racistviews.

31. Although Oaks points out that “It is difficult to see how [Heco’s presence at such a bat-tle] was possible, either geographically or chronologically,” the spurious nature of thisepisode would merely confirm Heco’s interest in America’s capacity for colonial violence(65n64). The most temporally proximate skirmishes between Americans and Mexicanswould have involved William Walker’s filibustering expedition into Sonora and BajaCalifornia in 1853–1854.

32. In 1855, shortly before Heco’s visit there, the filibuster William Walker landed at SanJuan del Sur and attempted to conquer Nicaragua as a proslavery territory of the US.Notebooks VI.21–22 also includes a thicker description of Canton than the Narrativeprovides, commenting on the city’s occupation by British and French soldiers and mer-chants. Another discrepancy in the representation of race occurs in Heco’s firstencounter with a black man upon landing in San Francisco: whereas Heco notes howstunned he was by the “black object,” Murdoch imposes a much more racist accountof the “black thing,” changing Heco’s third-person references to the man from “he” to“it.” Murdoch later significantly condenses Heco’s description of black servants and the“negro dances in the evening” that he observed at Sanders’s home in Baltimore (seeI.145).

33. Hall happily reports in his diary the following incident, which attests to both Hall’sown increasing proficiency in Japanese and the imperfections of speech and habit thatmarked Heco as differently Japanese: “A Japanese girl hearing me talk imperfectly inher own tongue would believe nothing other than that, I was a Japanese ‘like Heco.’She could not be convinced to the contrary” (172).

34. In a more recent essay, Anderson suggests that his “one-sided” analysis of the signifi-cance of newspapers in nation formation “completely missed two other interconnectedprinciples of coherence. The first is that newspapers everywhere take ‘this world ofmankind’ as their domain, no matter how partially they read it. It would be contra nat-uram for a newspaper to confine its reports to events within the political realm in whichit is published. Rwandan horrors in Tokyo’s newspapers, the eruption of Mount Pina-tubo in Stockholm’s, the European football Cup final in those of Rangoon, all seemabsolutely natural in exactly the same way. The second is that this ‘natural universality’has been profoundly reinforced—everywhere—by an unself-conscious standardizationof vocabulary that radically overrides any formal division in the newspaper between localand foreign news” (“Nationalism” 120). The early Meiji government’s suppression ofseveral newspapers also suggests that they did not exclusively serve the interests of mod-ernization and nationalism (Jonas 48–49).

35. These leading exclamations do not appear in Heco’s manuscript, and were probablyintroduced by Murdoch.


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36. For a broad account of the effect of Meiji land reforms and global market forces uponthe Japanese countryside, see Tussing: “as the demand for non-agricultural goods andservices increased, former side occupations became primary occupations, first of indi-vidual members of farm households. Later individuals might become entirely commit-ted to nonagriculture, ‘going-out’ (dekasegi ) to work for long periods of time, and farm-ing might fall from the primary occupation of the household as a whole to the statusof a side occupation” (62).

37. See Beckert for an extensive analysis of the “Worldwide Web of Cotton Production”initiated by the cotton shortage arising from the American Civil War.

38. See Auslin on the system of unequal treaties with Western nations.

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Documents

Biography 29.2 (Spring 2006) © Biographical Research Center · cosponsored an exhibition on Heco and the castaway John Manjiro entitled Humanity Above Nation. But a closer look at