Manjiro was a fisher in Japan. He was 14 years old. He set out for a fishing trip in 1841. Disaster struck. A storm caused the ship to crash. Manjiro and the crew were stuck on an island.
The crew survived for months. Then, an American ship came. Captain William Whitfield took the Japanese fishers to Hawaii. When Whitfield left, Manjiro went with him.
Manjiro reached New Bedford, Massachusetts, on May 7, 1843. Other Japanese people had visited the United States. But Manjiro was the first to live there. That’s one reason that May is Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month!
Manjiro wasn’t the last Japanese . For hundreds of years, Japan was closed off. In 1853, it opened to trade. And in 1860, the first official Japanese leaders traveled to America.
By the end of the 1860s, Japanese people were moving to America. Between 1886 and 1911, more than 400,000 people made the trip. They mostly settled on the U.S. West Coast or in Hawaii.
Life in America wasn’t always easy. Many immigrants worked tough farm jobs. And they faced . Some laws made it impossible for Japanese people to own land. Still, the immigrants created communities. And they grew their own businesses.
Then came a dark time. World War II started in 1939. Japan and the United States took opposite sides. U.S. leaders decided that people from Japan were a danger. From 1942 to 1945, officials forced people of Japanese descent to live in . There were 10 camps. About 120,000 people were held. Many lost their land, businesses, and belongings.
George Takei is an actor. He was in the TV show Star Trek. As a kid, Takei lived in these camps. He wrote about this. Takei shares about when his family had to sleep in stalls. For his parents, “it was a devastating blow,” he wrote. “They had worked so hard. Now we were crammed into a smelly horse stall.”
Takei makes sure Americans don’t forget this time. After all, learning from the past can make a brighter future.
Today, the United States has about 1.5 million people of Japanese descent. Japanese Americans live all across the country. They make up the sixth largest AAPI group!
Updated May 4, 2023, 5:01 P.M. (ET)
By Ashley Morgan
