Native American in the Land of the Shogun: Ranald MacDonald and the Opening of Japan (review)

This is an unusual book about an unusual man, Ranald MacDonald, who has a cult-like following in 'Friends of MacDonald' societies in the United States and Japan. MacDonald was born in 1824 in Astoria, Oregon, the grandson of Chief Comcomly, a Chinook, and the son of Archibald MacDonald, a Hudson's Bay Company trader. He was educated at the Red River Academy. After a brief, unhappy stint of clerking in St Thomas, Canada West, he joined an east coast whaling ship. His chief claim to fame, however, was his ten months in Japan, after which he claimed to have been 'the instigator of Commodore Perry's expedition to Japan' (17). After travelling through parts of Asia, Australia, and Europe, he returned to North America where he engaged in a variety of endeavours in British Columbia before retiring to the Colville Valley of Washington State, where he had spent part of his childhood. As a mixed-blood, he initially identified as a 'white,' but in his old age he considered himself an American 'Indian' (21). Frederik Schodt, the author of this biography, suggests that MacDonald's discovery that he was of mixed blood (his mother had died shortly after his birth), may have influenced his decision to go to Japan.

The book is unusual because the author intersperses a scholarly narrative of MacDonald's life with stories of encounters with MacDonald's 'fans' at MacDonald monuments and on field trips. As Schodt admits, it is not a full biography since it passes over MacDonald's little-known career in Australia and his longer time in British Columbia in order to provide 'detail on the environments that helped propel him on his course in life' (xiii). In fact, Schodt uses MacDonald's story as a peg on which to hang gossipy biographical sketches of his contemporaries and descriptions of the histories and settings of places that MacDonald visited in North America, Hawaii, and Japan, and of the adventures of others there. Among such events, which were at best peripherally associated with MacDonald, was the 'Dickson Filibuster.' A madman persuaded some young men of Red River, but not MacDonald, to join a ragtag expedition whose goal may have been to take California from the Mexicans. Schodt admits no one knows what Ranald thought of the event, but without providing direct evidence, suggests that Archibald MacDonald may have viewed his son in the same disdainful way as did the parents of the young lads who fell for Dickson's scheme.

Yet Schodt dispels myths that have arisen around Ranald MacDonald. He tells, for example, the story of the three 'kichis,' Japanese sailors who accidentally drifted across the Pacific to be rescued by the Makah people and who have become the subjects of a novel and film in Japan and a musical in the United States. Though fiction writers have linked them with MacDonald, Schodt, after extensive research, found no evidence that they ever met.

The book was written for American readers. To cite a simple example, it informs readers that the British Columbia Archives are in Canada. Despite Schodt's extensive research in the Hudson's Bay Company and other archives and careful attention to separate the many myths about MacDonald from reality, Canadian students of the fur trade are unlikely to learn little that is new. Japan, and its limited contact with foreigners before Perry, however, is the centrepiece. There, despite being imprisoned, as was common for foreigners who strayed into Japanese territory, MacDonald reached an accommodation with his captors. He taught conversational English to some of the official interpreters at Nagasaki who needed that knowledge to deal with the increasing number of British and American vessels that, despite exclusion laws, were entering its ports. Canadians will find this lively and nicely illustrated adventure tale and historiographical detective story to be an entertaining entrée...