9 　Joseph Heco Story


Humanity Above Nation
While in Washington, Heco befriended Navy Lieutenant John Mercer Brooke, who had been assigned to survey the waters from California to Hong Kong. He offered Heco a job as clerk aboard his ship Fenimore Cooper so that he may return to Japan. To ensure Heco’s safe return to Japan, Beverly Sanders helped Heco apply for American citizenship. When Judge William Fell Giles granted his citizenship on June 30, 1858, Joseph Heco became the first American citizen of Japanese ancestry.

When Heco finally arrived in Japan in 1859, he was by then an educated young American man at 21. Though he had become an American citizen, Heco thought of himself as a Japanese, and endeavored to reintegrate himself into Japanese society. That was to be a difficult task, as Heco was a target of anti-foreign radicals, and he had to re-learn how to write Japanese. American in manner and dress, he was again treated as a foreigner, this time in the country of his birth. Yet in 1864 he founded the Kaigai Shinbun, the first Japanese newspaper published regularly with current international news. He did this with the help of Japanese editors Kishida Ginko, who assisted Hepburn in Romanizing Japanese, and Homma Kiyoo, who later became a diplomat to Austria.

Heco strongly believed in the ideas of democracy he learned while in the United States, and became a political activist in 1867.






Heco strongly believed in the ideas of democracy he learned while in the United States, and became a political activist in 1867. Kido Takayoshi and Ito Hirobumi, influential Choshu samurai in the movement to restore imperial rule, visited Heco in Nagasaki to discuss American political history. In 1868, after a brief civil war, imperial power was restored and the Meiji period began. Kido Takayoshi served as a senior advisor for the Meiji government. Ito Hirobumi drafted Japan’s first constitution and went on to become Japan’s first Prime Minister in 1885.

The boy Hikotaro who was shipwrecked at age 13 grew to be a man whose influence straddled two nations, and became a modernizing force in Japanese government. This could not have happened without the spirit of generosity and trust freely given by people of different cultures: humanity above nation.

The END
written by Joanne Fujita [Joseph Heco Society of Hawaii ]
Don't forget The 5th US-Japan Cultural Exchange
Seminar Program on Saturday, March 15th!