On the eighteenth day of the first month of 1860 the embassy gathered at the naval training station at Tsukiji, and that afternoon went aboard the American warship Powhatan, which lay off Shinagawa. With the interpreters and the attendants they came to seventy-seven in all; some sources give eighty-one. The Americans had expected a small embassy, and are said to have been surprised at the number.
The Pacific passage was rough. From the twenty-third to the twenty-seventh day of the first month the gale and rain held: one seaman fell from the mast, water came into the cabins, the ship heeled thirty-five degrees, and a boat and the pickle tubs were washed away. The loss of the pickle tubs, Sakamoto Fujiyoshi writes, relieved the American sailors of the smell.
A party that reckoned a king “no different from an island chief”
On the fourteenth day of the second month the Powhatan entered Honolulu in the Kingdom of Hawaii. The Japanese record calls the place “the port of Honolulu, Oahu island, among the Sandwich Islands, in the Pacific sea”. They stayed about seven days, partly for repairs to the ship. Of Honolulu as it then was, the attendants' records say “more than a thousand houses in the town, with merchants come from every country to make their living”, and “an island opened up these three or four years”, and they noted eating aubergines, melons and watermelon, and that it was a warm country.
The audience with the king was not asked for by the Japanese. Word came from the commander of the Powhatan that the king wished to meet the Japanese envoys. The entry for the eighteenth day of the second month in the vice-envoy Muragaki Awaji-no-kami's Kōkai Nikki (his journal of the voyage) keeps the course of it as it was.
Tirol brought word that the king of this island asked to meet the Japanese envoys. As it is no country we are close to, we declined civilly; but we were told that to decline such a courtesy is to fail in courtesy among the nations, so we consented and fixed two in the afternoon … (king though he is called, he is no different from the chief of an island, and we decided to go in our travelling clothes.)
They tried once to decline, consented only when it was explained that abroad this counted as discourtesy, and then went in travelling clothes rather than formal dress — that was how it stood. The Hawaiians, however, treated the party as state guests and brought them to the palace in a ceremonial carriage. The king wore gold epaulettes; Queen Emma received them with both shoulders bare and a jewelled ornament at her neck.
The king's words were that he was obliged to them, and that they must be put to much inconvenience while they lay in port. They passed through two stages of interpretation: an American rendered them in English, and the interpreter Namura Gohachirō put the English into Japanese. Muragaki left two poems on his impressions of the day: one on the splendour of the palace — “one would call it the dragon's palace beneath the sea, the very scene of Urashima that I saw in a picture” — and one on the dress of the king and queen, which took him aback: “the master wears his cords tucked up, the lady bares her shoulders wide, to meet their rare guests.”
The shogunate's party offered to pay the cost of their stay, but the Hawaiians answered that they had received them as state guests and would take nothing. The party made gifts of textiles and lacquerware instead. They were invited to an evening party as well, but declined, on the ground that they could not attend a mixed gathering of men and women before they had carried out their charge in America.
What Oguri went to see was a newspaper office
The first place Oguri went to see in Honolulu was neither the palace nor the harbour works but a newspaper office. There he watched a demonstration of printing from type, which the record calls the copper-plate printing method. The head of a finance group who went with him, Morita Okatarō Kiyoyuki, wrote this in the Akō Nikki.
The wheel of the machine is called a press; it prints so fast that it does some sixteen hundred sheets in a day.
The surprise did not end there. When they had the interpreter translate the printed paper, the articles turned out to be full of errors. Oguri and Morita judged it “nothing but idle rumour, not to be trusted”. What puzzled them most was an article describing Japanese currency. By Namura Gohachirō's translation, the ōban was “six sun long and three and three-quarter sun wide”, worth about ninety-five dollars, “the largest gold coin in the world”. But what the phrase “one four times the size of a koban” referred to they could not make out at all. Morita wrote at the end of his entry: “As to the one four times the size of a koban and so forth, which coin it means is doubtful. I asked Gohachirō again, and he said it is as the original has it.”
That one day meant a great deal for Oguri. After his return he planned, with Fukuzawa Yukichi, to bring out the first Western-style newspaper in Japan. Had it come about, Oguri said later, opinion in Japan in those last years of the shogunate would have been very different. The visit to a newspaper office in Hawaii was his first meeting with the Western press.
From Honolulu the party went on to San Francisco. The call at Hawaii put their arrival at the ninth day of the third month, later than the Kanrin Maru, which crossed the Pacific without a stop and arrived on the twenty-sixth day of the second month.
Sources: Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987 (quoting Morita Kiyoyuki, Akō Nikki); Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy), Kaigun Yūshūkai, 1941 (quoting Muragaki Awaji-no-kami, Kōkai Nikki); Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki, Oguri Kōzukenosuke, Oguri Kōzukenosuke o Shinobu Kai, 1975