Rhoda Blumberg,
Shipwrecked! The True Adventures of a Japanese Boy.
HarperCollins, 2001

Who was Manjiro? A nine-year-old sent out to work on a fishing boat. A castaway, a whaler, a seeker of fortune, and a sage. Rhoda Blumberg learned about his nineteenth-century Japanese adventurer while she was writing her Newbery Honor Book Commodore Perry in the Land of the Shogun (1985). She credits Manjiro with helping to open Japan to the modern world at a time when Japan was strictly closed. Before the United States arranged a treaty with Japan in 1854, Japan employed the vast Pacific Ocean as, in Blumberg’s words, "its moat." No one who left Japan was allowed to come back.

No one, that is, except Manjiro. That an outcast from Japan’s lowest class coaxed his leaders into friendship with the West is impressive enough, but that he also did so many other things - attended school in Massachusetts, panned for gold in California, joined a mutiny at sea - is amazing indeed. Manjiro’s life is a striking blend of fate and will. While Manjiro was living among Americans, he sampled beds and chairs, put on a Western hat and pants, and tried exotic dishes. ("Eggs, oil and salt mixed with flour is good food. They call it bread," he reported.) This kind of material plays to Blumberg’s gift for revealing a culture through the eyes of someone unfamiliar with its ways. Manjiro tells us something of both East and West in every observation that he makes.

Blumberg gives a fast-paced, chronological account of Manjiro’s life. The chapters are short, and the book has a comfortable length. Young readers won’t object to the lack of footnotes, but the book could use a little more discussion of its sources. Since sharing his knowledge was one of Manjiro’s most important acts, the record he left - and the record that others have made about him - is an integral part of his story. With exciting decorative lettering, the jacket illustration by the nineteenth-century artist Hokusai creates a stylish cover. Inside the book, abundant period art reveals the different worlds in which the Japanese and American people lived more than a century ago. Several sketches by Manjiro of the island where his fishing boat was stranded, the whales he learned to hunt, and the ship he sailed on add a vital human touch.

Mary Lou Burket
Summer 2001